User Profile

I'm Mark (so are lots of other people, but I haven't let that stop me) and this is my 'blog.' It's not terrifically interesting and periodically lies fallow. Being a blog and not an idiot, it typically manages to avoid meandering existential meditations and, so far as I'm aware, has never yet attempted to justify its presence on the internet. When in Rome...

The truth is that I made it one night, several years ago, after the playing of three quarters of a game of risk, the oration of two or three lines from Joyce's Ulysses and the consumption of a few bottles of Guinness and maybe some vodka. I forget. It had a great quotation from Aliens in the tagline which was later changed to a much funnier quotation from Terry Eagleton regarding the providential significances of a particular confluence of French Theorist and Laundry Van. I've actually nothing personal against Barthes and like to think he'd appreciate even this ironic Mythology. I've also nothing personal against critical theory, though perusal of communities like theoryishotcrew leads me to suspect that excessive exposure to it may have adverse effects on personality in general.

I'd actually spent most of the previous year or so proudly proclaiming that I'd never set up an account on something like Livejournal. I've since approached a succession of other networking sites with the same skepticism, exercised with the same integrity and success. Had I been sober at the time I'd probably never have gotten past the first curious click on the 'create account' tab. Had I not then proceeded to berate a relative stranger on msn (one who would have been a complete stranger were it not for the fact that we're ended up in each other's contact lists through joint participation in a University society webforum), wander to his room on a nearby campus, get completely wasted and stagger home in the early hours of the next morning, I'd have lacked anything interesting with which to grace my account the following afternoon and the fruits of my drunken foray into the blogosphere would have lain where they fell.

For the most part it may as well have done. There's rarely been much more here than grumbling about work / future uncertainties / the trials, tribulations and occasional triumphs of collaborative musical activity / why everything sucks TM / why everything else sucks TM / why the world NEEDS me to tell it that it sucks (pat pending)/ why Nai is awesome / and sometimes cheese.

Taken in the aggregate it just about works and the various pissings, moanings, hopings, worryings, gripings, posturings, postulations and procrastinations do more or less reflect the changes in my life and opinions (of which this is nothing if not a barely organised miscellany and nothing more if so) over the four or so years in which I've written here.

Up until fairly recently this 'userinfo' page consisted of a linked image meme type thing displaying a lot of album covers, a slightly ridiculous description of myself, an animated monkey and a collection of quotes. Something about the internet and quotation, isn't there? Given the chance for self-expression, not only do we all rush for the nearest social networking pro-forma but, once there, we compete to find the best, funniest, silliest, most profound examples of things other people have said. I'll put some in later. Anyways, things have moved on and I've decided to finally call time on the previous offering and attempt to give a slightly more relevant account of myself. Relevant to 'what' I'm not exactly sure. Here goes.

I'm Mark (and so is the guy who wrote all that guff above, but don't let that stop us)and you're the sort of person who keeps reading a stranger's online self exposition despite being forced to wade through seven paragraphs of meandering waffle. And counting.

As of this writing, I've two degrees which seem to directly qualify me for very little beyond further and increasingly specialised study. I'm therefore working towards a PhD in English and American Literature, my methodological take upon which floats somewhere around a 'New' Historicism partial to the location / identification of 'deconstructive' effects within the texts it situates. I'm 'post-structuralist' in so much as 'Structuralism' has been, but not fundamentally a 'Poststructuralist' in so much as I aim to actually produce positive knowledge of my objects in a manner useful outside the massaging of my own intellectual ego; truth and knowledge may theoretically be relative, but then that's theory for you. I'm also rather fond of Jacques Derrida: there is nothing outside the blog... except maybe the rest of the internet... hyperlinks make it hard to be sure.

As an academic I specialise in the Gothic, primarily within literature and particularly that of the British Victorian period. I'm interested in working outside this area as appropriate, but that's where most of my recent and ongoing work has been situated.

I'm a cynical, sarcastic, critical and often downright annoying sonofabitch but I'm nevertheless rather partial to my friends, of whom there are a small but solid group, and generally believe that the girl I'm engaged to marry is the closest thing possible to being my soulmate. Which therefore makes her my soulmate. In light of that, don't let the foregoing description of myself put you off: Nai is actually a very nice person. We met as undergraduates in Canterbury when, struggling to be heard above the ambience of your average pub metal and rock night, it transpired that we'd actually lived but a short distance from each other many years before, even attending the same secondary school for a couple of years. Three and a half years on and we live together in a beautiful Cotswold village where we're involved in a houseshare with a brother and sister. It's a mutually convenient arrangement, particularly as we tend to use different parts of the house. Nai and I spend most of our time in the bedrooms / study / kitchen whereas the other two usually pass the day lying around in the conservatory or sleeping under the radiator at the end of the upstairs hallway.

I play the Bass Guitar, own several and am most often seen brandishing a six string variant several feet away from an additional fourstringer with a fantastic drummer and guitarist present, but no singer to be seen or, indeed, heard. We're not as active as we'd like but get lots of enjoyment out of what we do.

I watch a surprisingly small number of films, read a predictably large number of books and listen to everything from Electric Folk to Electric Wizard.

Like everyone else I exist in various forms scattered across the internet. I have a pet theory that gathering enough together here will cause them to cohere into a colossal hypertextual simulacrum capable of striding out of the internet and threatening sundry western cities before being cunningly distracted into an argument about contemporary popular metal and trapped forever in an oubliette filled with outrageously bad festival lineups screaming to be deconstructed over and over again. In order to save everyone the pain involved in this, I'll only list a few of the vaguely relevant here; along with some others of tenuous relevance.

Facebook... sigh.

Last FM, wherein I am seemingly incompatible with everyone. Especially those I enjoy discussing / sharing / listening to music with.

A long time ago there was a thing called Myspace.

The Mighty, Monolithic, Meandering and quite often Missing-In-Action: 'How Soon? Sweet Achilles.'

A collection of great dance songs.

Bang! And the dirt is gone.

Friends (51):

Mutual Friends (45):

Also Friend of (2):